I noted several weeks ago that I received a laptop from HP that I tried and liked okay, though not without a few reservations. About two weeks later, I decided that while the machine did what I needed, what I really wanted was another Mac. I deal with enough problems with my Windows desktop as it is, and believe it or not, some applications I prefer to use (including OmniOutliner, Curio, MAMP, and Google Notifier) are Mac-only. The trade-offs, however, included abandoning the on-board dedicated video card on my customized dv2000t, 20 gigs of drive space, 512 megs of RAM, and about $200. And with the slew of issues plaguing MacBook users, I was particularly apprehensive. But in the end, I'm very glad I made the switch. (To HP's credit, their email and telephone support was absolutely fantastic, and the return didn't cost me a penny. Pity you can't keep the company from self-destructing. :p)

The screen is MUCH improved over the HP laptop, which while an inch bigger, had a cheap plastic sheen to it and was uber-reflective. The color saturation was annoyingly off as well. Both were bright and quite usable, but the MacBook has better color (considerably better than my antiquated iBook) and the reflectivity is low, even in use outdoors and in poor lighting conditions.

My other MacBook concern regarded Rosetta; on the Mac, I doodle with SketchBook Pro and Photoshop Elements 2 (via a Wacom tablet), apps which are not Universal Binaries. Fortunately, even with the paltry RAM, it does perform acceptably. There are quirks though. Fast successive strokes will occasionally be misinterpreted, which can be an annoyance, but the problem is not so great as to make it an unusable solution.

As for Windows, I've currently got Boot Camp set up (because Parallels costs about $80 more than I'd care to spend at the moment) and running a $15 copy of Windows XP Pro (bought through the Microsoft Student Alliance Program through American River College, w00t), and loaded with Visual Studio 2005 and Office. For kicks, I also got and ran the benchmark for my beloved MMO, Final Fantasy XI, and was surprised to with the resulting score:

3207 - "We assume that your computer can run FINAL FANTASY XI for Windows enjoyably with the default settings. If your video card exceeds the recommended system requirements, it may be possible to run "FINAL FANTASY XI for Windows" easily even in high resolution mode."

So there you go. FFXI is playable on a MacBook with integrated graphics, albeit with chop and on low resolution.

You know what else runs better than I feared? Second Life. And I may talk about that in greater detail later, but for now, some pictures of the machine I forsook:

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Fun while it lasted, but I'm glad I moved on. Here's my current "studio":

PlayOnline throws a player event every once in a while to stir things up... and for some reason they thought it'd be neat to unleash some gi-normous bulls near low-level cities. Nothing that your level 15 white mage can't tackle... not really.